Giselle

At 173 years old, Giselle remains a vigorous perennial. Choreographed
by Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, it is the jewel of the Romantic ballets, surpassing
even its much-admired predecessor, August Bournonville’s La Sylphide. Since
its premiere in Paris in 1841, Giselle has not merely endured—it’s
one of the most frequently performed ballets in the world’s classical repertory.

The story of Giselle originated in a German legend about ethereal creatures
called Wilis. These maidens, who had been betrayed by their lovers and then died before
they could wed, emerge from their graves at night to seek vengeance on any man who
happens upon them. Théophile Gautier, a poet and leader of the Romantic movement
in the French art world, discovered the legend in the writings of German poet Heinrich
Heine and decided it would make a beautiful ballet. He enlisted playwright Jules-Henri
Vernoy de Saint-Georges to help him translate the eerie tale into a theatrical production.
Together with composer Adolphe Adam, these collaborators produced an instant success:
Giselle, ou les Wilis.

San Francisco Ballet first presented Giselle in 1947, courtesy of Anton
Dolin, a former dancer with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, The Royal Ballet, and
Ballet Theatre (now American Ballet Theatre), who had formed a touring company with
Alicia Markova. But it wasn’t until 1999, when Artistic Director & Principal
Choreographer Helgi Tomasson re-created the Romantic classic, that SF Ballet’s
dancers could call it their own.

Dolin’s version, based on the original, featured himself and Markova in the
lead roles, with SF Ballet dancers filling out the ranks. Portions of Giselle
returned to the Company’s repertory in 1965 (the peasant pas de deux) and
1975 (the grand pas de deux, again performed by guest artists). Twenty-four years
later, Tomasson gave his dancers a new production in which they, not guest artists,
would dance the leading roles.

“New,” however, is a relative term. Tomasson tailored a Giselle
that remains true to the original story and its themes of love, betrayal, and
forgiveness. Like many productions, it retains most of the Coralli/Perrot choreography,
handed down largely thanks to Marius Petipa, who restaged Giselle in classic
form in St. Petersburg in 1884. Over the years, though, choreographers have taken
creative license with the ballet, placing Giselle in an insane asylum, for example
(Mats Ek’s production for Cullberg Ballet), or setting the action in Louisiana,
where the Wilis haunt the bayou rather than the forest (Frederic Franklin’s
version for Dance Theatre of Harlem).

More than 100 years after its premiere, Giselle became dear to the heart
of a young Icelandic dancer, Helgi Tomasson. “I fell in love with that ballet,”
he says. “I loved dancing Albrecht.” He danced in four productions, with
four companies: Erik Bruhn’s for the Royal Danish Ballet, Alicia Alonso’s
at the Paris Opéra Ballet (with Noëlla Pontois), David Blair’s for
American Ballet Theatre, and Anton Dolin’s at National Ballet of Iceland. “When
I set out to mount the ballet,” Tomasson says, “I tried to bring my love
for it to the stage.”

Tomasson retained much of Dolin’s approach to the ballet, which was filtered
down from Alicia Alonso, Olga Spessivtseva, and Alicia Markova. “A lot of things
Dolin had spoken about came into my mind as I was working on this production, particularly
the way he interpreted Albrecht,” Tomasson says. “He made him more noble,
aristocratic. It’s because of circumstances that he leaves Giselle in the first
act; it’s not his choice. He realizes how much in love with her he is.”

Tomasson recalls how Dolin talked about images and “showed the movement.
Like when he was on the bench with Giselle—how he would stand, how he would
be with her.” Tomasson speculates about why Albrecht might be drawn to Giselle:
“Is it because he doesn’t care for the superficiality of the court? Is
that what led him away? And her innocence, her joy of life—she wasn’t
pretending to be someone else. Maybe that’s what he fell in love with first.”
Making Albrecht a sympathetic character enhances the poignancy of the love story.

Though Tomasson, a self-described traditionalist, wanted to honor Giselle’s
history, he recognizes that dancers and audiences change over time; consequently,
he looked for ways to update the ballet while remaining true to the original style
and intent. Such choreographic fine-tuning is like walking a tightrope: you want to
engage new audiences without alienating those who know and love the tradition imbued
in the classics. Some changes you make “because of what you have around you,”
says Tomasson. “We have fabulous male dancers these days, in many companies.
Is there a way to incorporate them [more fully] into the production and still have
it make sense?”

Tomasson felt compelled to give his men more to do. To expand Albrecht’s
dancing role, he made a pas de deux for Giselle and Albrecht in the first act; he
set it to a portion of the original score that had fallen out of use, thinking it
appropriate to reinstate it. “To me, Albrecht wanted to show off for Giselle,
and how would he do that?” Tomasson says. “In ballet, he would dance.
The music was there, so why not do that?” He also changed the Act I peasant
pas de deux to a pas de cinq. After all, he reasoned, there were dancers he wanted
to feature, and it made sense that a dance that celebrates friendship and the harvest
would include more people. “[George Balanchine] always said to me, ‘Use
what you’ve got,’ ” Tomasson says. “And I have wonderful dancers.”

To perform Giselle well requires impeccable technique and the ability
to immerse oneself in the characters that occupy an “otherworld”—a
world in which undead brides-to-be fly through the forest at night and make strong
men dance to their deaths. Whether audiences connect emotionally with the fantastic
story—and thus come to care about that world’s inhabitants— depends
largely on the choices made by the choreographer, and the dancers as well.

Giselle is famous for its difficult footwork, balances, and virtuoso sequences—all
done, if you’re Giselle or Myrtha (Queen of the Wilis), while looking otherworldly,
weightless, and alternately serene, vengeful, or sad. But character is equally important.
Giselle, in the course of a brief intermission, leaves her naïve girlhood behind
and becomes a mature, loving wraith/woman capable of forgiving Albrecht for his betrayal.
Albrecht can be played as a conniving cad or, as Tomasson prefers, a misguided, earnest
young man in love, confused and frustrated by the social limitations imposed on him
by nobility. And the outwardly heartless Myrtha must find a shred of humanity in her
no-longer-human form that allows her to hesitate when Giselle pleads for Albrecht’s
life. Without this kind of emotional depth from the dancers, the characters become
flat and distant.

For Principal Dancer Maria Kochetkova, Giselle stands apart from other
classical ballets because of the profound changes the central character goes through.
“It’s more than a fairy tale,” Kochetkova says. “It’s
much deeper; the story is much more intense. It’s a drama.” She calls
Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, for example, “only one person,”
while in Giselle “you get to be so different, from the peasant girl
into the mad scene and then into the ghost creature. It’s such an amazing story
to live onstage.”

Kochetkova wasn’t quite as enthusiastic the first time she was asked to dance
the role, at age 19. When Vyacheslav Gordeyev invited her to perform Giselle with
the Russian State Ballet in St. Petersburg, she turned him down. “It’s
not me. I don’t know how to do it. It’s not my kind of role,” she
told Gordeyev. Eventually she acquiesced. During rehearsals in London, Tamara Rojo,
then a principal dancer with The Royal Ballet (now artistic director of English National
Ballet), told Kochetkova to watch the film Dancer in the Dark, in which Björk
portrayed a woman going blind.

Björk’s performance—of a woman desperate to maintain her life
despite her loss of sight—influenced Kochetkova’s interpretation of the
mad scene in Giselle. “I didn’t want to be a madwoman running
around,” she says. “I didn’t want it to be scary; I wanted people
to feel sorry for her.” To further flesh out the character, Kochetkova watched
interviews and programs and read books about Giselle. “You need to
know all the background in your head,” she says, “who she is, how she
feels, not just that she’s a peasant girl. You need to know where she was yesterday
and what she did a year ago, how she is with Hilarion and Albrecht.”

Now, years later, Kochetkova says she sees Giselle completely differently.
“The more you do it and the more you study, the more you understand,”
she says. She equates revisiting a role to rereading a book. “Sometimes you
understand, but not quite, and you have to read it a second time. And it becomes so
suddenly clear for you. That’s how I feel with Giselle.” The first time
she danced the role she grappled with the technique. Later, as her understanding of
the character grew, the steps became natural. “It’s suddenly so clear—that’s
why I plié here, that’s why I turn my head to him here,” she says.
“It all makes sense. The steps are the way to express whatever you do onstage.
I feel like every single step is genius. Everything is in the music; it leads you
into each mood. You come on in the first scene and it leads you into the rest of the
ballet.”

Of particular note is a deep penché (forward-leaning) arabesque in the second
act. Giselle is surrounded by lines of immobile Wilis, and the stillness of the moment
can make the choreography seem daunting. The penché comes out of a turn, creating
one long, sustained balance. To Kochetkova, it’s absolutely necessary because
it prepares the dancer for the action to come. “It puts you into the mood for
the second act, because you have to be so concentrated and quiet. You really have
to control it. It’s so quiet, so slow. It’s like a transition—it
transmits me into a different world. I know it’s scary, I know it’s hard,
but I feel like that’s the whole point. It makes total sense for me in the choreography.”
She smiles and adds, “Apart from that, it looks quite beautiful when you don’t
wobble!”

Choreography conveys character, which, according to Kochetkova, comes from each
individual. “It’s the same steps, but the story can be so different—what’s
behind it, how the ballerina feels,” she says. “It’s personal. That’s
why this ballet stays for centuries now.”

According to Ballet Master Katita Waldo, who danced Myrtha when she was a principal
dancer in the Company, Tomasson gives his dancers plenty of freedom to interpret their
roles. “He tries to find what will work for you, to bring out whatever is in
you that will be this character,” says Waldo. She describes Myrtha as “complex”
and the role as “technically brutal.” “She has to be very commanding,
and that’s the hardest part, because you’re exhausted—it’s
so technically demanding.” The leader of the Wilis has to be “one huge,
powerful thing,” Waldo says. Yet underneath Myrtha’s bitterness and desire
for vengeance, there’s “a glimmer of the young girl she was. The love
that Giselle and Albrecht have for each other is so big that it lightens something
in her.”

That love is dramatized in a pivotal moment at the beginning of the second act.
When Giselle enters, at first Albrecht can’t see her; he only senses that something’s
there. Gradually he realizes that what he senses is Giselle’s presence. As they
dance together, the girl he betrayed becomes real to him. Their deep devotion, so
powerful that it transcends even death, makes audiences, like Giselle, forgive Albrecht.
By the time a devastated Albrecht throws himself on Giselle’s grave, viewers
have fallen under the spell of this eternal love story.